So give Peter’s work a go and see where you might find opportunities to improve it or better yet, create Linux installation packages. Myself, and the larger Linux and Open Source Communities would appreciate it.

Server

There are all kinds of Linux servers. The most complicated of these require you to be a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE). Many of them require you to do more than download a distro, burn a CD, and install and boot up your new bare-bones servers. But, say you have a particular job for a server and the boss wants it done yesterday, what do you then? Well, one excellent choice is TurnKey Linux.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

A new packet scheduler is designed to help avoid buffer bloat and “Early Retransmit” offers faster connection recovery after TCP packet loss. The E1000e driver already supports the network chip for Intel’s next-generation desktop and notebook platform.

The current release of the Debian Linux distribution (“Squeeze”) seems to be affected by the problem in a similar way to the Mozilla servers. In a post mortem analysis at serverfault.com, the authors write that several computers at a data centre no longer responded to pings and displayed a blank screen after the leap second was inserted. System administrators were reported to have saved the day by stopping the NTP daemon and executing a Perl script that reset the leap second bit in the kernel.

Gdev, the GPGPU run-time and resource management engines that provides an open-source NVIDIA CUDA run-time, is still being worked on at the University of California Santa Cruz in conjunction with PathScale.

Games

While most of the native Linux games that can be easily automated are built atop the id Tech engine or some spin-off there of the open-source id Tech 2/3/4 engines, here’s something new to play with this weekend. There’s also some early results to explore.

Earlier today I was tipped off by a Phoronix reader about Unvanquished, following my recent controversial comments about most open-source game artwork being awful. “I read your article on how Open Source programs (for the most part) are awful. I agree with this to some extent, but I would like to show you some of the animation models in Unvanquished. It is an Open Source game which is still in Alpha, but the models are absolutely amazing in comparison to the game it is branching off from (Tremulous).”

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

As you may know, there is no Kubuntu for Raspberry, due to the incompatibility of Kubuntu ARM version with the little computer. I wanted to create an image for raspberry most similar as possible to Kubuntu, so I basically took the original Debian release and add some packages to have the entire Plasma Desktop. The result is quite nice, I think, and the system itself uses about 100-110 MB of the total RAM (there is also some swap on the card image). It’s also quite speddy: the only problem could be that when you launch a new program, for some seconds the CPU load is 100%.

Yesterday, nearly 300 hackers grabbed their badges at the Estonian IT College in Tallinn and launched Akademy 2012. Mathias Klang’s keynote, Freedom of Expression, got things going quickly with his urgent call to action for those who stand for freedom, which often disappears gradually and in a slow creep.

Here comes an award winning word-processor for all KDE lovers. Akademy awards, an yearly award given at KDE community conference, has choosen Calligra Words as the best application for this year. This is a big boost for all KDE lovers as well as for Words users.

GNOME Desktop

One of the key areas which gnome always lacked was the message tray. From Gnome 3.6, this area is going to be re-branded and is going to have some awesome features. Have a look at the below screenshot as to know how this tray will look like:

This is the follow-up to this review. At the time, the 64-bit edition had not been released, and I was unable to install packages in the live system probably due to a bad USB writing procedure by that particular version of MultiSystem that I was using at that time. For this post, I tried the 64-bit edition of SolusOS 1.1 “Eveline” using a live USB made with UnetBootin. Because I am simply discussing whether installation of my preferred packages worked, I will keep it short and sweet.

The TurnKey Linux project is one which I’ve been meaning to explore for some time now. Their slogan of “Lighter, smaller, faster and easier” certainly sounds appealing and their approach to providing Linux solutions sets them apart from other distributions. The description of TurnKey, as given by their website, is “TurnKey Linux is a virtual appliance library that integrates and polishes the very best open source software into ready to use solutions. Each virtual appliance is optimized for ease of use and can be deployed in just a few minutes on bare metal, a virtual machine and in the cloud. We believe everything that can be easy, should be easy.”

A couple weeks ago, the latest version of Pinguy OS came out, and I wanted to try it. I haven’t had the time until today, though, so that’s why the review is happening today.

I previously reviewed Pinguy OS 11.10 and found that while there are certain things to which I may not be able to become fully accustomed, the “beta” label on Pinguy OS 11.10 seemed overly cautious considering its stability and high quality overall. The latest version has not changed much from that beta version besides having newer packages in general, but because version 11.10 was never truly official, the changes in version 12.04 LTS are of course huge compared to version 11.04. Also, accompanying the new release is a revamped website, which looks a lot cleaner and less bloated than before.

New Releases

I would like to announce the immediate availability of Fuduntu 2012.3, our third quarterly release for 2012. Like all previous Fuduntu releases, this release follows our tradition of making small incremental distribution improvements that don’t sacrifice the stability of our Linux distribution. Existing Fuduntu users have already rolled up to 2012.3, as all of the updates available are released to our stable repository.

Red Hat Family

I just started a new job in marketing and social media at Red Hat. This is my first time working for an open source company, and I didn’t know what to expect. I knew what it meant for software to be open source, but I had no idea how the principles of open source could be applied to other areas of business.

Open source runs deep at Red Hat. Everyone I’ve met seems to make a personal mission of showing how the open source way is the best way─not just in technology, but also in business practices and creative work. They certainly practice what they preach.

Next week the annual Debian developers conference, DebConf, will begin in Managua, Nicaragua.

DebConf12 is taking place from the 8th to 14th of July in Managua, the capitol of Nicaragua. The DebConf12 tracks include DebianDay, getting involved in Debian, Debian for the cloud, building and porting, social activities, skills exchange, and DebCamp.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

For the last few months, the Ubuntu team has been quite busy in attracting more and more developers to its platform. Currently a three week event called Ubuntu App Showdown is going on about which we had posted earlier. You can learn about creating Ubuntu apps in this contest cum event through Google+ hangouts and YouTube videos and also get a chance to win exciting prizes like smartphones and laptops.

Nearly everyday, I’m told that users of Linux distros don’t need to worry about malware on their computers. After all, many newer users rationalize that since most malware targets Windows, securing a Linux based workstation is a non-issue.

My response to these individuals is that anything that executes code is potentially in danger from malware of one form or another. Realizing this, I thought it might be interesting to look at how the threat of malware and other security issues might be something Ubuntu users should be more aware of.

We have been closely following Ubuntu App Showdown, a contest cum workshop. Over the past two weeks, 20 workshops sessions have been conducted which covered every step of creating and submitting an Ubuntu application.

As we posted earlier, Ubuntu 12.10 software updater is going to get re-branded and polished UI. Weeks ago, the Update Manager had been renamed to Software Updater and here your bring to you the first looks of the new UI.

Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, announced a few minutes ago, June 29th, that the Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint 13 Xfce Edition operating system is available for download and testing.

For those who like to have a fast and lightweight Ubuntu system installed in their machines, Lubuntu is one of the best choices available. This is an Ubuntu based distribution which uses LXDE as its desktop environment and works stunningly fast even on old hardware.

Phones

Android

We talked yesterday about how Ubuntu and Google could possibly pair up and in turn bridge the smartphone/PC gap. Well, guess what kids? Surprise! Surprise! It’s Ubuntu RIM talking about pairing up with Google’s Android in order to revive its tarnished image and get the company back on track. As of now, things do not seem pretty for the Canadian multinational giant as it is bounded with huge fiscal losses and already whacking the whip over more than 5,000 employees.

Look what we have here, a new Xperia model has just popped up on the Indonesian Postel site which suggests that Sony Mobile is planning to release an Xperia S refresh. The Sony Xperia SL handset has the LT26ii model number which suggests it will be a spec-refresh of the existing Xperia S (LT26i).

It seems Samsung is looking to roll out low and mid-range devices running Android 4.0 OS. The GT-B5330, apparently, will be one of the first affordably priced handset from Samsung to run Android 4.0. While the Chinese certification doesn’t reveal much except the phone’s physical QWERTY keyboard, 3G support and a display supporting a resolution of 320×240 pixels (QVGA), it is the GL Benchmark test that divulges the phone’s OS. The phone runs Android 4.0.4 and features a CPU with max frequency of 850MHz.

Huawei has put up an official website (in Chinese) for the Emotion UI. The new skin works on Android 4.0 ICS devices, and for now it looks like only the Huawei Honor, Huawei Ascend P1, and Huawei Ascend P1E are supported. The Ascend D Quad flagship will most probably also be included here after it gets launched.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

“The Microsoft Surface holds no interest for me outside of the keyboard,” said Google+ blogger Linux Rants. “I’d be curious to see that particular piece of hardware put to use on a real tablet … .” As for the Nexus 7, it’s “interesting, and I’m very tempted by it,” he added. “I prefer a 10-inch form factor over the 7, which is really the only thing that’s holding me back.”

Samsung is turning out to be the most lazy company when it comes to updating their devices. Android 4.0 was released last year and most Samsung devices including the famous tablets that gave Apple run for their money and the scared company rushed to the court has not received Android 4.0 yet.

Recent years have seen huge changes in internet use, and therefore in the challenges presented by modern website design. Software developers are consequently racing to catch up and provide website design, creation and management tools that address these changes.

Web Browsers

Chrome

If you are a Google Chrome user, you might have noticed that a new version of this browser gets released every six weeks with loads of security and bug fixes. While this is good as it means it keeps your Internet browsing always secure and up to date, it also means that you waste a few minutes updating and installing new version of browser now and then, and also configure and sync it according to your needs. But from now, this will not be the case as Google Chrome come with automatic updates pre-enabled.

Mozilla

Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko project has come a long way in just under a year — what began with the idea of building a mobile operating system based on open web standards like HTML5 has led to a full-fledged product being prepared for a commercial launch in the coming months.

Mozilla has rebranded its mobile operating system Boot to Gecko to Firefox OS. Mozilla is working with TCL Communication Technology (Alcatel) and ZTE to bring the first Firefox OS powered smartphones to the market.

Is there room in the smartphone space for another OS? Mozilla is banking on the answer being “Yes.” Its HTML5-based Firefox OS “will likely be a low-end alternative to Android,” said tech analyst Greg Sterling. “It’s unlikely to rival top-of-the-line Android devices or the iPhone. Developer and consumer acceptance are wild cards. But I could see it succeeding in selected developing markets.”

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

The LibreOffice team is getting ready for the next release and things have been getting exciting. This week, LibreOffice Design team has opened a poll for best splash screen to be included in LibreOffice 3.6. Weeks ago, LibreOffice developers hadd started a contest and best splash splash sreen selected from them are open for public voting.

CMS

With the latest version of WordPress just arriving, version 3.4, I’m sure people who are using the self-hosted version of WordPress are interested to know what is included with this update. Along with the usual bug fixes, included are many improvements and additions that will benefit both designers, developers and end users. Let’s take a look and see why.

Version 2.16 of glibc, the GNU C Library, was released on Saturday afternoon. This update to the de facto C library for GNU/Linux systems brings many new features. There’s x32 and ISO C11 support along with performance optimizations.

There’s still no end in sight to the ongoing Secure Boot saga arising from Microsoft’s Windows 8 plans, and just recently we’ve seen both Fedora Linux and Ubuntu Linux respond with two very different approaches to working around the problem.

After Red Hat revealed how it would kowtow to the overlords at Redmond, it was only a matter of time before Canonical would genuflect as well over the issue of secure boot.

But Canonical, which is best known for its Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, has come up with a way of getting its distribution to boot on PCs certified for Windows 8 that is even worse than that devised by Red Hat.

Project Releases

Licensing

Openness/Sharing

A few years ago, I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With my trusty Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 I enjoyed the ability to watch and record Comcast TV on my desktop computer — and even to occasionally edit and re-upload it to YouTube along with fair use critical commentary. When I moved across the river to Boston, Comcast required me to pay for a set-top box that would tune channels on my television. However, when I plugged my PVR-150 into the cable connection, it got almost no channels at all. As it turns out, the Comcast system in Boston had been migrated to use mostly digital signals, but my tuner card worked only with analog cable signals. Fair enough, I thought, I’ll buy a digital cable tuner. As it turned out, that wouldn’t help much. The cable companies had implemented encryption to fight “service theft” of most channels that subscribers had not paid for. As a result, I lost the ability to view channels I had paid for on a device of my choosing.

Programming

Some weeks back I wrote “Death to Javascript”, in which I related the problem my wife has reported, of web pages that tie up her computer. She’s been seeing this more and more often lately. But today we got lucky: she was able to identify a specific page, on CNN.com, that causes this to happen.

As explained on the project’s web-site, “Pymothoa extends the Python language by adding JIT compilation without any modification of the interpreter source code. Pymothoa lives at the application level. It uses the AST generated by Python. Therefore, users write in the original Python syntax but with a new contextual meaning in some cases using the new dialect provided by Pymothoa. User uses the decorators provided to mark Python functions for JIT compilation. Pymothoa uses LLVM for the JIT ability. Comparing to writing C-extension to speedup Python, Pymothoa is less cumbersome and easier to distribute as the user does not need to compile the C-extensions. Programming in the Pymothoa dialect is similar to writing in C. Variables must be declared and are statically typed. Despite a few extra constructs, the syntax is the same as raw Python code.”

Standards/Consortia

One year and a half ago, an important part of FFmpeg developers decided to change the way the project was managed. This led to some kind of takeover, mainly to get rid of the old maintainer dictatorship, but also to change development methods, redefine objectives, etc. Then, for various reasons I will quickly explain, these people made a new project called Libav.

The Web Applications Working Group at the W3C has published a last call working draft of the Selectors API Level 1 specification. Widely used in CSS, selectors are patterns that match a set of elements in a structure tree. As accessing elements in HTML documents using DOM methods such as getElementById or getElementsByTagName can quite laborious, frameworks like jQuery have developed simple CSS selector methods. Many browsers offer querySelector and querySelectorAll functions that also use these selectors.

Google has released its grip on the development of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and moved it under the control of a steering committee comprising developers from Google, Sencha, Red Hat, ArcBees, Vaadin, mgwt and other GWT advocates such as Thomas Broyer, Christian Goudreau and Daniel Kurka. First released as open source in 2006 and controlled by Google, GWT will now be under the control of a committee which will set out a direction for future GWT development, approve new committers, review code, administer releases, adjust the GWT development processes and work as master committers on the GWT project.

Gmail’s growth has skyrocketed since its public introduction in 2007, but this year in particular, Google has been successful in attracting millions of new users. In January, Google mentioned in its earnings call that it had about 350 million monthly active users on Gmail; six months later, about 75 million more users had flocked to Gmail, growing the total number to 425 million monthly active users. By this measure, Gmail has dethroned Hotmail.

Reddit, Mozilla, Gawker, and possibly many other web outfits experienced brief technical problems on Saturday evening, when software underpinning their online operations choked on the “leap second” that was added to the world’s atomic clocks.

After 20 years of service, owner France Télécom is pulling the plug by switching off the “X 25”, the network over which the service works.

A precursor to the internet, Minitel gave a dial-up information service over phone lines via special terminals, consisting of a screen using text and basic graphics, with a keyboard and modem. Long before the World Wide Web, people could use it, for example, to reserve trains, search for phone numbers, buy online, pay bills, play games or chat.

A little-noticed U.S. Supreme Court decision from June 21 has dealt a blow to public sector unions and demonstrated the conservative majority’s preferential treatment for corporate “rights.” The decision in Knox v. SEIU could have an impact on future election cycles.

Health/Nutrition

I was offline most of yesterday, and I returned to see long threads about health care and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling [PDF] on the Affordable Care Act [PDF]. That surprised me, because I didn’t think you would be greatly interested. That’s why I didn’t even put it in News Picks, let alone write about it. But now I see I was wrong, that many of you are interested, and I also see a lot of misunderstanding of what the ruling actually says, not only in your comments but in the media. I also see a lot of FUD in the air. So I thought I’d take the time to explain it. If nothing else, it fits our purpose for doing Groklaw, since antiFUD is very much what we set out to do, and we have covered Constitutional issues before, albeit in the First Amendment context usually.

The evening after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Wisconsin chapter of the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity held a “Hands Off My Health Care” rally to plan next steps in their effort to defeat “Obamacare.” The plan apparently involves American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation.

Finance

Everyone knows that Italy’s unelected PM, Mario Monti, is a former Goldman Sachs International ‘advisor.’ As such, it is only natural that being part of the banking cartel he would do everything in his power to promote an inflationary agenda, one that seeks ECB bond monetization intervention, (another central bank headed by a former Goldmanite of course, who just happens to be Germany’s most hated man), perpetuates the status quo, and one that naturally contravenes everything that German citizens have been pushing for in their desire to avoid the risk of another hyperinflationary episode. Especially if, as is well-known, resolving Europe’s problems, however briefly, facilitates an Obama re-election campaign because as conventional wisdom is also catching on, should Europe implode before November, Obama’s reelection chances plunge accordingly. And yet, even as Goldman’s tentacles had spread all over Europe (as seen here), conventional wisdom was that Goldman’s influence in Germany was relatively muted.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and other banks won greater ability to fall under foreign regulations when they trade swaps overseas under guidance proposed for the Dodd-Frank Act’s international reach.

Commodity Futures Trading Commission members, in a private vote, unanimously approved proposing interpretive guidance allowing for so-called substituted compliance for branches, subsidiaries and other overseas affiliates of U.S. banks when foreign jurisdictions have comparable rules. Banks have spent two years lobbying against efforts to automatically apply Dodd- Frank to their overseas operations, saying doing so would hurt their ability to compete.

Censorship

Everyone knows what you do when someone like Charlie the Censor sues you. You lawyer up. If you’re very lucky, you have funds to hire a good lawyer, or you can get the backing of extraordinary advocates like those at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But what do you do if someone like Charlie the Censor just threatens to sue you at some unspecified future time or place, but doesn’t yet? Do you simply wait and see? Do you live your life under that cloud?

Privacy

Twitter lost a landmark court case on Monday after a New York judge ruled against the company’s attempt to avoid handing over information of one of its users, an “Occupy Wall Street” protester, to the Manhattan District Attorney.

Civil Rights

The three former NSA employees with declarations in EFF’s brief are William E. Binney, Thomas A. Drake, and J. Kirk Wiebe. All were targets of a federal investigation into leaks to the New York Times that sparked the initial news coverage about the warrantless wiretapping program. Binney and Wiebe were formally cleared of charges and Drake had those charges against him dropped.

American cops are set to join the US military in deploying American Science & Engineering’s Z Backscatter Vans, or mobile backscatter radiation x-rays. These are what TSA officials call “the amazing radioactive genital viewer,” now seen in airports around America, ionizing the private parts of children, the elderly, and you (yes you).

Wednesday is the Fourth of July, the day when we in the U.S. celebrate whatever we perceive to be the vision of our founding families. This would seem to be a good time to wonder what the framers of our constitution would think about the way we’ve been applying, or not applying, due process to the Internet.

There are two cases in the news these days that are quite disturbing. For starters, there’s Megaupload.

The only things that Kim Dotcom, aka Kim Schmitz, appears to have done wrong was to start Megaupload, a hugely successful file hosting service. The feds see it differently. They’re convinced, mainly by circumstantial evidence, that’s his website has made him the biggest pirate of movies and music online, an allegation he denies.

Federal authorities were evidently waiting for SOPA to pass before making their move against him and his site. On the same night that public opinion forced SOPA to fail, however, the feds decided to act anyway. They took down his website and had Dotcom taken into custody by the New Zealand authorities. They seized most of his assets, without proving anything in court, and are now attempting to have him extradited to the United States.

Internet/Net Neutrality

The essence of a network is its connections and, indeed, the multiplicity of those connections. While there are many ways of networking (putting up a card in the newsagent’s window still works fine!) we can not avoid at this point of the 21st century that the network of networks is the Internet.

DRM

One of the points in the Swedish Pirate Party’s program is that Digital Restriction Mechanisms (DRM) must be outright banned – it is not enough to allow their circumvention. This has been a point of contention among coders.

Intellectual Monopolies

Well, this is unfortunate. We’ve written a few times about how various countries, under the TRIPS agreement are able to break patents on important medicines in the interest of public health. Most recently, we wrote about how India did this with a cancer drug made by Bayer called Nexavar. Despite the fact that Bayer has more than made back the money it spent bringing Nexavar to market, it’s been pricing the drug at an unaffordable $70,000/year. After India allowed a small bit of competition, the price has dropped. We’ve seen that the USPTO doesn’t like this at all and has tried to claim that high priced drugs are good for one’s health, but that’s beyond ridiculous to anyone who actually thinks.

Copyrights

ACTA

This is it. This is the week when ACTA lives or dies, globally. We have seen it coming. Now is the time for the very final push in contacting the European Parliament. On Wednesday, in the session between 12 noon and 14:00, the European Parliament votes on ACTA. If the European Parliament kills it, it dies globally.

La Quadrature du Net felt the urge to share works with the Members of the European Parliament and their assistants ahead of the ACTA vote, and in order to shed light on the urgency of reforming copyright. Some of these works aim at enjoyment and others at extending knowledge or enriching the public debate. All of them innovate in content, ways of distribution, economic models and relationship between authors, contributors and users. All citizens can do the same, and share pieces of digital culture with their elected representatives!

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A Single Comment

I don’t know why Steven has to perpetuate the linux is crappy fud in this article – because that’s all he does. His reasons boil down to “it’s great for geeks but too messy for stupid people and they don’t want to be associated with that”.

The reasons are a lot simpler: Linux is just a kernel, not an operating system, and more importantly from a business perspective, is that they simply don’t own the trademark. They say ubuntu and android as both are their trademark and the marks under which they’re running their commercial operations.

The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again